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Hardly Houdini: footage of an escapologist

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Around eighteen months ago, my son had discovered that he could escape from his cot. We’d occasionally hear a thud followed by footsteps followed by a door opening followed by ‘Hello.’ On one particular occasion I was lying awake in the early hours of the morning, and I heard what I can only assume was his battle cry (he’d been watching Cars a lot), ‘MCQUEEN!’, followed by the sound of him running across his room and yanking the door open.

It went on for a while, and I used to joke that I would like to hide a camera in his room so I could see how he does it — the McQueen incident had left me with visions of him leaping over the side of the cot like a character from The Beano springing over a fence.

I should have realised there would be no such grace — he is, after all, my son. His gracelessness was confirmed to me over Easter in 2012 when we were visiting his nanny’s house. As was often the case, he had no intention of going down for a nap and had already managed five escapes when I realised that we had our camera with us. So I decided that I’d have one more go at putting him down, but first I would set the camera rolling and hide it somewhere.

As it happens, after his subsequent escape I checked on the camera and saw that it had run out of battery and died. I figured it probably hadn’t caught any of his Houdini act and promptly forgot about it.

Then about three months later, I was backing up the data on the camera and I found this…